Is this really what I want to aspire to though? Something that reminds me of something I liked before and might therefore conceivably enjoy again, if I put the work in? Apparently I can’t pretend that I’m immune to the appeal of this stuff, but that doesn’t stop me from wanting more than either Multiversity: Guidebook or Earth 2 have to offer.

If you swapped the names in that paragraph out for “Your Old Droog” and “Action Bronson”, and replaced the idea of putting work in with “trying not to think about race” then you’d have a fairly accurate record of how their works hit me.

Droog and Bronson don’t have much in common beyond their home town and a love of shit-talk. Bronson blends baroque culinary references with absurd descriptions of his physical prowess. Don’t get me wrong, the big guy’s got some moves, but songs like ‘Rare Chandeliers’ see him pulling off spectacular combos that would make Jackie Chan feel like captain inadequate:

Backflips off the ledge, hang-glide off the roof
Land on one leg, see me all up on the front page
Holding a pump gauge, ready to dump, aim
At your nuts, like the mouth of a whore
Somersault Cadillac on the door

Bronson’s voice is high pitched, needling, and his flow is punctuated by moments where his voice drops, breathless at the end of a sentence as he comes crashing through safe wall or some other shit. There’s no getting around it: he sounds like Ghostface Killah.

Your Old Droog, meanwhile, raps in a low growl, snapping hard on the internal rhymes, referencing ’90s rock bands, only pausing to dare you to call him out for it:

Back in the line of fire
Sayin’ my style’s dated is like checkin’ to see if wine expired
Salut, thought of that bar in the car
Cheffin’ up in the truck like halal food
Got them raps for you, I ain’t talkin’ gyros
Get on the mic and spit that porno for pyros

I stopped apologising for failing to update my blogs back when Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind was a new movie and people were still talking about Michel Gondry as a promising new director of feature films. It was a more innocent time. Our opinions about Jim Carey were less conflicted and we were not yet tired of the cinematic output of MTV auteurs.

Rest assured that having tackled my traditional, start of the year panic as to who the hell I am and what the fuck I’m trying to do with myself, I’ll be updating this site with more regularity in weeks to come.

I wrote a short piece on Sarah Horrocks’ Bruise, a self-published sci-fi chase comic that’s every bit as dedicated to its own vision as you might hope. It’s sixteen pages short, and when you get to the end you’re left with a partial map that makes the journey you’ve just been on even less comprehensible:

As I say in the piece, that’s exactly the sort of alt comics experience I crave.

Having finally worked out how to attract attention, the Greens now find themselves in the awkward position of trying to appear both electable and radical, hence Caroline Lucas’ statement that Citizen’s Income wouldn’t be a manifesto commitment or a “red line” issue for post-election negotiations. While Lucas’ position is reasonable enough in itself (Citizen’s Income is still party policy, but the Greens won’t realistically be in a position to implement or insist on it after this election), it plays a little bit too neatly into the idea that basic income is a fairytale.

The hostile press spin is that they’ve “dropped” the policy, and while conservative publications and Labour tribalists are both equally unlikely to embrace the Greens anytime soon it seems to me that the Greens willingness to fight for big, genuinely transformative ideas like Citizen’s Income is an asset in the current political environment.